CHAPTER TEN
1372 Words
CHAPTER TEN
POV: Nyla
"Show me," I said, and I said it the way I said everything right now, flat and practical and without any of the feeling underneath it showing on the surface, because the feeling underneath it was something I was not ready to look at directly and I had enough problems without adding that one to the list.
Tarek looked at me for a second like he was deciding whether to keep lying about it, and then Roan made a small sound from beside him that apparently settled the argument, because he pulled the side of his shirt up without another word and I looked at what the rogue's claws had done to his ribs and kept my face completely still and said nothing about what I was seeing.
It was bad. Three deep lines running diagonal across his left side, the kind of wound that did not kill you immediately but absolutely would if left to itself in unclaimed territory with no healer and no pack and nothing sterile within a day's walk of where we were sitting.
"You were going to say nothing about this," I said.
"I was going to say something when it became relevant."
"It is relevant right now. It has been relevant since you climbed out of that river." I looked at Roan. "Do you have anything in that pack or are we working with nothing?"
"Some cloth. A little salt water solution left from yesterday." Roan was already opening the pack beside him. "Not much."
"Give it here." I held my hand out and he passed it across without argument, which I appreciated about Roan, he did not waste time on ceremony when the situation did not call for it. I moved in front of Tarek and he watched me come without speaking and I did not look at his face because looking at his face was not going to help either of us get through the next five minutes with any dignity intact.
"This is going to hurt," I said.
"I am aware."
"I am not warning you for your sake. I am warning you so you do not grab my wrist when it does." I pressed the cloth to the wound and he pulled in a breath through his teeth and his hand came up instinctively and stopped two inches from my wrist and went back down, and I kept working and said nothing about the restraint that cost him.
"You did not have to do this," he said quietly.
"An infected wound slows us both down. I am being practical."
"Nyla."
"I am being practical, Tarek. Do not make it something else."
He went quiet. I kept working. The clearing around us was still, the five rogues on the opposite bank long gone by the time I had gotten Tarek upright, whatever I had done to them apparently wearing off the moment I lost consciousness, and the silence should have felt like relief but instead felt like something holding its breath, and I did not like that feeling at all.
"What happened back there," he said. Not an accusation. Something quieter than that.
"I do not know."
"You threw five shifted rogues twenty feet through the air without touching them."
"I said I do not know." I tied off the cloth and sat back on my heels and finally looked at his face, which was a mistake, because he was looking at me with that careful, thorough attention he had, the kind that made you feel like he was reading something in you that you had not chosen to show, and I had specifically decided that was not going to affect me anymore. "It just happened. I did not decide to do it."
"The wolfsbane is still in your system," Roan said from behind me, his voice careful. "Whatever that was pushed through it anyway. That is not a small thing."
"I know it is not a small thing." I stood up and put distance between myself and Tarek's face. "I also almost collapsed immediately after, so whatever it is it is not reliable and we cannot plan around it, so I would appreciate it if neither of you started looking at me like I am a solution to something."
Tarek said nothing. Roan said nothing. Which meant they were both already looking at me like I was a solution to something and had the sense not to say it out loud.
We moved within the hour because sitting still in unclaimed territory with fresh blood on the ground was an invitation to everything we could not afford. Tarek moved without complaining about his ribs, which I noticed, and which I said nothing about, and Roan took the lead through the undergrowth while I walked and tried very hard to think about practical things like distance and direction and not about the way my hands had felt steadier on Tarek's wound than they had felt on anything since the ceremony ground.
They came back at midday.
Not five this time. Three, and smaller than the ones from the river crossing, but faster, and they came from two directions which meant someone had told them to split and flank and these were not feral rogues running on instinct, these were rogues following instructions, which was a different and more dangerous thing entirely.
Roan took the one on the left. Tarek moved immediately toward the two on the right, putting himself between them and me with the automatic certainty of someone who had made a decision about where he was standing and was not open to discussion about it, and for exactly one second I let him, I stood behind him and watched him engage the first one and thought, practical, let him handle it, you are still weak, this is sensible.
Then the second one went around him.
It came for me low and fast, shoulders down, and Tarek shouted my name and turned to cover me and the rogue was already too close for him to get there in time, and something moved in my chest that was not fear. It was not panic. It was something older than both of those things, something that lived underneath the wolfsbane and the weeks in the cell and all the careful practical walls I had been building since the ravine, and it rose without asking my permission the same way it had at the river crossing except this time I was not on my knees and half unconscious.
This time I was standing.
I put my hand out and the rogue stopped moving.
Not gently. He hit an invisible wall two feet from my outstretched hand and the impact sent him sideways and he hit the ground and stayed there, shaking, his shifted body unable to find its feet, and I looked at him on the ground and felt the power moving through me like something enormous and patient that had been waiting a very long time to be useful and was not remotely interested in my feelings about it.
I turned to the one Tarek was holding.
I did not touch him. I looked at him and the thing inside me looked at him and he folded. Just folded, all at once, shifted back to human mid-collapse, a young man suddenly on his knees in the dirt with his hands up and his face the particular color of someone who has just understood something about the situation that changes everything.
"Go," I said to him. "Tell whoever sent you what you saw. Tell them exactly what you saw."
He ran. I did not watch him go.
Tarek was standing three feet away and when I turned to look at him he was looking back at me and his expression was not the one I expected, it was not awe and it was not strategy, it was something that looked dangerously close to undone, and I looked away before either of us could do anything stupid with that.
"Your ribs," I said. "You pulled something when you turned just now. I can see it."
"Nyla—"
"Sit down, Tarek."
He sat down. And I told myself that was practical too.
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